 All right. Okay, great. Hi, everyone. How's it going? My name is Allison McKittrick, and I am the Outreach and Instruction Librarian for Special Collections. Today, I'm going to be giving you all a brief intro to Special Collections. I want to talk a little bit about archival and digital collections, as well as about archival research, and we're going to do some primary source analysis. And at the end of the session, I want to show you the Digital Teaching Collections Research Guide that we've created. This is to help you with your primary source research this semester. But before I move on, I just want to point out this photo here in the slide. Just to let you know this is what a class at Special Collections normally looks like when we don't have restrictions on our reading room or our classroom because of COVID. So I'm so sorry that we can't have that experience here today. But I also very much want to encourage you all to come in to Special Collections at some point to do some archival research or just to explore some of the many wonderful collections that we have at UT Libraries. We are open to all researchers. You don't have to be a UT student or alumni. Anyone is welcome at Special Collections. Okay, so what is Special Collections? Well, at UT, it's the place that collects, preserves, and provides access to the university's rare and distinctive primary sources. Our Special Collections here at UT is its own department, but we are also part of the larger library, and we're located on the first floor of Hodges. Our full name is the Betsy B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, but that's quite a mouthful, so we usually just say Special Collections. So we have four main categories of collections beginning with rare books. We have over 70,000 titles, some of which are extremely old, some even going back to the 15th century, some are extremely rare, some are extremely unique, and some are both. For instance, we have a Cherokee spelling book from 1819. It is one of only three copies known to exist. So next, we have university archives. These are materials that are from or about the university, going back to when we started as Blunt College 226 years ago. These might be papers from academic departments, administration, sports programs, and certainly all of our university publications, such as volunteer yearbooks and the Daily Beacon newspaper. Next, we have our modern political archives. This is housed in the Howard Baker Center on Cumberland Avenue, and it contains the papers of important Tennessee politicians from the modern era. So those of Estes Keyfather, who you see here, this guy with the cute hat riding on the pony. He was a Tennessee senator and vice presidential candidate. And then of course, there is Howard Baker himself. We have his papers. He was another prominent senator from here in Tennessee and former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan. So lastly, we have our manuscript collections. These are basically collections that don't fall into the other three categories. For the most part, these are records from notable individuals, families, and organizations from our area. So think Knoxville, East Tennessee, Appalachia, and the Southeast. And they cover the major historical events such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Reconstruction, World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. These collections include famous artists, performers, musicians, and writers from our area. For example, we have the original screenplay of Pulp Fiction by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. Some of you may or may not know that he was born from right here in Knoxville. Okay, so now I'd like to talk a little bit about archival and manuscript collections and how they differ from the collections that you might be more used to or familiar with in the library. So archives are simply made up of records, and records are literally any piece of information recorded on any type of format. So certainly these are what we usually think of when we think of records, organizational meeting minutes, financial ledgers, personal diaries, letters, photographs. But people sometimes forget that there's other less formal sorts of records that make up our collections, advertisements, ticket stubs, pamphlets, receipts, maps, postcards, as well as electronic records or what we call born digital records, things like videos, gifts, oral histories, audio recordings, social media posts. Obviously, you know, all the stuff that you're seeing here aren't digital records that are necessarily held by UT libraries. But I did want to show these here as a reminder that these are important primary sources, and they're often overlooked. But there are digital archivists all over the world that are working really hard to preserve them. They're very important. So a collection is simply a group of records or items donated by or purchased from a single source. Collections can be as small as a single item or as large as several hundred boxes. So for instance, this photo here at the top, this rough looking box, this was a tom capsule from 1906 that was unearthed from the cornerstone of Estherborough Call here on campus in 2018. It now lives as a single item collection with us. And all the mush inside of it is still with the collection. The other photo is from the modern political archives. This is Chris Bronstadt, our archivist for the modern political archives. And you can see here that we have collections that take up many, many boxes and lots of shelf space. In fact, altogether, we have almost three miles of archival and manuscript collections if you set the boxes back to back. And for that reason, we do have to keep all of our university archives and manuscript collections off site. The only collections that we keep at Hodges are our rare books and our university publications. All right. So what else is different? Well, special collections, materials are non-circulating. So that means you can't check them out, can't take them home. In normal times, researchers come into the reading room, they look through collections, they take pictures with their cell phones, they make notes with their laptops, but they have to leave the materials here. Now, because of COVID, our reading room has even more restrictions, unfortunately, and we are only able to accommodate researchers by appointment only Tuesday through Friday. So as I mentioned before, we are not having any in-person classes this semester either. But if you do happen to have any questions about coming to special collections or want to come in this semester, please find more information at our website or you can email us. And that information is in the chat as well. So don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions. Okay, so that brings us to our digital collections. We create digital collections at UT Libraries to make our rare and valuable non-circulating materials accessible. This has been particularly useful, as you can imagine, during the past year when we've had so many restrictions. Having digital collections that researchers can use means they don't have to come into special collections to view materials. You know, normally when a researcher comes in, we have rules. You can't have any food or drink or ink pens near the materials. You have to keep your backpack and your jackets and the locker away from the collections, and we're only open certain days a week. With digital collections, however, you can access the materials anytime, from any place, as long as you have an internet connection. The other benefit is that when you're viewing digital collections from an academic institution like UT Libraries or some other credible library, museum, historical society, or from one of the many primary source subscription databases that we have here, you can be sure that the information accompanying the digital records is accurate. You know, when you do a Google image search or see images and a blog or on social media, you can't be guaranteed that the information associated is going to be credible or accurate if there's any information associated with it at all. On the contrary, every image and document in our digital collections comes with what we call metadata. And metadata is simply defined as data about data, or in this case, information about an archival record. So information such as the title of the record and its date of creation, a description, related subjects, names, and geographical locations, as well as the record source or publisher. The metadata which accompanies our digital collections can also help you with all the information that you need for your citations. Okay, so any questions before I move on to talking about archival research? Anybody have any questions? All good? Okay. Well, again, feel free to unmute yourself if you do have a question or type your question into chat. I'm happy to stop and answer anything, so that's not a problem. All right, so we've looked at special collections, we've looked at our materials. So archival research, what is the best approach when you're working with primary sources? Well, the way in with primary sources is pretty much the same, whether you're a seasoned historian or someone who's just starting their work with archives. We ask questions, we try to get a handle on what are the basics. So for example, the most basic is what type of document? Is it what are we looking at? Is it a letter, photograph, a receipt, a map, what is it? So somebody want to take a guess here? What do you think this is? What does this look like to you? See the chat here. Oh, okay. Sorry, I wasn't checking the chat. Yeah, newspaper, absolutely. Magazine, newspaper, hybrid, absolutely. Who created it? This one might not be so easy. Take a guess. Yeah, absolutely. Frank Leslie. We're not sure who Frank Leslie is, but it does say Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper at the top, so yeah. When and where was it created? Do you see any dates on there? Any geographical locations? And the date is August 23, 1879. So even if you're not sure, I mean, this document pretty much gave us all that information, even though we're not totally sure who Frank Leslie is. Oh, I'm sorry, Chris, I know it is tiny. And especially the stuff at the bottom. But I'm hoping that I've got some text with it here that will help us to see it a little bit better. So sorry about that. But yes, under every single document, there is going to be a click for details button where you can get the metadata about the about the item so you can learn as much as you can about the item. So another thing to keep track of when looking at primary sources is you're going to want to identify any gaps in your understanding and then consult any credible secondary sources that you might need to fill in those gaps. Consulting secondary sources is essential to understanding context. We have to look at what other historians and experts have interpreted or said about similar sources and perspectives. So one fundamental question that we can always ask about a record is who was the original audience? You know, one of the differences between primary and secondary sources is that primary sources weren't necessarily created for future research. You know, when we're reading Civil War letters, I can pretty much guarantee you that the writers of those letters never dreamed that UT students or anybody for that matter would be reading their words 150 some years later and using it in their research. You know, and even when you're looking at sources that were created to document events like a newspaper or magazine, it's important to understand the original intent of the source because that can give us a whole lot of information about any biases that might be presented or any gaps in context that we don't know about. So we always have to keep in mind that with primary sources, we're only getting one perspective, one tiny view of history, especially if they're very old. So it's inevitable that questions are going to come up as we wonder what other perspectives are missing and how this particular source fits into a wider story. So it's up to us as researchers to take the time to gather information and put primary sources into an accurate historical context. Okay, so original audience, this is definitely going to be a gap. It was a gap for me. I would be so impressed if anybody knew the original audience of Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper. So I looked it up. From the American Antiquarian Society, which is the oldest historical society in the US, I felt that was a credible source. This was the first successful illustrated newspaper in the US. After the Civil War, it became very pro-union and it was mostly read by northerners at this point and its circulation, which was almost 200,000, which was a lot back in those days. So now let's look a little bit more closely at the source and describe what information or content it presents or contains. This is the description here from the metadata that accompanies it. And yes, as Chris has said, this tiny little text down here in the digital collections, you can zoom in and see that really easily, but you can't so much on this presentation. And I apologize for that. But what it says is, Tennessee, arrest of yellow fever refugees by the safety patrol of Memphis. The image is of two men with guns approaching an unarmed family at a refugee camp. Okay, great. But is that enough to have a clear idea of what this image is representing? What do we still need to know? What are some of the questions that come up for you and looking at this? What questions do you have about this? What do you want to know more about in order for this to make sense to you? Yeah, who are the people in this image? Who are yellow fever refugees? What does that term mean? And who are the safety patrol of Memphis? Where? Yes, great. Where did the refugees come from? Where was the yellow fever? Why are they arresting them? Yeah, that's a really good question. My goodness. Why is this poor unarmed family cowering behind a tree being arrested by the safety patrol? What's going on here? Yes, sure. And that's an interesting point. So maybe this image is not meant to give you a whole lot of info. It's supposed to grab your attention, maybe. Yes. We're used to that tactic, aren't we? I think we're definitely used to that. Which brings me to the next kind of set of questions that we can think about and ask. And those are questions where we really analyze the source. And in particular, what insights does the item give us about the time period in which it was created? You know, we may not be able to know everything right away from looking at this source. But I think we can definitely say a lot of things about how it's different from now, what it tells us about that time, maybe some of the differences or similarities. So what do you think? What are some insights that you see by looking at this? One approach that you can think about with getting some insight is, you know, how would this be presented now? Oh, there was definitely conflict, both in causing the refugees to flee and the safety patrol to arrest them. Oh, yeah. We can definitely know that there's some conflict happening about the yellow fever. And I think we can all relate that to things happening currently, right? We know there's definitely conflict now with the coronavirus. Whether it's the same kind of conflict, I don't know. We would have to consult some secondary sources to find out. What else? What are some other insights here about this time period? What do you notice about the illustration? I mean, is this usually how newspapers present things now? Oh, the way they're dressed, the types of weapons they use? That's interesting. Michelia says yellow fever was taken very seriously, but now we don't hear about it at all. Well, and that is a very good point and brings me to my next question, which is, why do you think that this document has been kept? Why would we keep a document like this? Absolutely. To remember what's happened, to have that documentation. Why is it important? What's the significance of having that memory or what could be a significance of having that memory? Anybody want to take a stab? Okay, so Allison says, like you mentioned earlier, there are parallels between the past and the present, and we can learn from how things happened in the past. Yes, beautiful. Absolutely. And Amber says, document in responses to disease and how people were treated. Yes, we can learn so much from the past and see how they compare to things now. Absolutely. And I think it's always very interesting. We always want to look at the past and think that people were so much less sophisticated, you know, or they that we somehow have something over on people of the past. And the more you see these kind of historical documents, you're like, oh, we're all, we're not all that different. We might have different technologies that people respond to things in very similar ways. So, okay, so how do I find what I need? Now that you've got some insight into maybe how to look at primary sources, let's look at some ways to find some stuff, right? So we have over 100 digital collections or almost 100 digital collections with almost 400,000 individual items. That's a lot. So instead, we've created the digital teaching collections to help you narrow down your sources for research this semester. So I'm going to take you guys to this page that we have and show you our digital teaching collections that you all can use for your archival project this time. Okay, so this link is in the chat. If you want to follow along with me, feel free to or make sure to keep this somewhere, you know, bookmark it so that you can come back to it. Because this could be a very helpful resource for you all, hopefully. If you go here to the navigating digital teaching collections on the right hand side, we've got some tutorial videos for you that introduce the collections, explain how to navigate and search the collections. And they are very short videos, I promise. Also introduction to research topics, we have several different broad categories of subjects that you can look through. You can see how to view and download the digital collection items, just in case you do want to use one of these and one of your digital projects. And certainly how to find information for your source citations from the metadata listed. And here's some more information on that. There's even a practice quiz that you can take. And here are questions to consider. These are the questions that we just went through with the yellow fever sketch to help guide you in your analysis for the primary sources. I know we are running out of time here, but I did just want to click on the Pandemics Epidemics and Disease page, so you get a sense of what these different pages look like. You'll have some individual items up at the top here. There's even a Lib God about the Spanish flu here as well as several individual items. And then if you scroll to the bottom, these are full digital collections that we have identified as being your best bets and finding information about pandemics, epidemics, and disease. Okay, so I know we probably need to stop the recording now, but I am around. So if anybody has questions after this, please feel free to stick around and I can answer any questions that you have.